But of all that population; there were two sections in which the most
beautiful elements of our human nature were most touchingly manifest--
the women and the priesthood, including in the latter denomination all
the various brotherhoods and societies which religion formed and
inspired.

It was on the 27th of December that Frederic Lemercier stood gazing
wistfully on a military report affixed to a blank wall, which stated that
"the enemy, worn out by a resistance of over one hundred days," had
commenced the bombardment. Poor Frederic was sadly altered; he had
escaped the Prussian's guns, but not the Parisian winter--the severest
known for twenty years. He was one of the many frozen at their posts--
brought back to the ambulance with Fox in his bosom trying to keep him
warm. He had only lately been sent forth as convalescent,--ambulances
were too crowded to retain a patient longer than absolutely needful,--and
had been hunger-pinched and frost-pinched ever since. The luxurious
Frederic had still, somewhere or other, a capital yielding above three
thousand a year, and of which he could not now realise a franc, the
title-deeds to various investments being in the hands of Duplessis, the
most trustworthy of friends, the most upright of men, but who was in
Bretagne, and could not be got at. And the time had come at Paris when
you could not get trust for a pound of horse-flesh, or a daily supply of
fuel. And Frederic Lemercier, who had long since spent the 2000 francs
borrowed from Alain (not ignobly, but somewhat ostentatiously, in
feasting any acquaintance who wanted a feast), and who had sold to any
one who could afford to speculate on such dainty luxuries,--clocks,
bronzes, amber-mounted pipes,--all that had made the envied garniture of
his bachelor's apartment--Frederic Lemercier was, so far as the task of
keeping body and soul together, worse off than any English pauper who can
apply to the Union. Of course he might have claimed his half-pay of